Anthropic Becomes a Top Scottish Mortgage Holding After 80-Fold Revenue Growth

Anthropic has become a top Scottish Mortgage holding in a matter of months, after the AI laboratory’s annualised revenue grew 80-fold and its valuation surged to levels that now exceed OpenAI’s. For investors in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (SMT), the position adds a second transformative private-market bet to a portfolio already dominated by SpaceX.

From $183bn to $965bn in Under a Year

Baillie Gifford took its initial stake in Anthropic in September 2025, paying £91m when the company was valued at $183bn. The valuation has since moved sharply. Anthropic’s Series H financing round, which closed at $65bn, was priced at a $965bn valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital. That almost triples the $380bn valuation Anthropic carried as recently as February, according to CNBC.

The speed of that rerating is a function of the underlying revenue trajectory. Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate now stands at $47bn, up from $30bn earlier this year and $10bn for the whole of last year. Co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei has credited the acceleration largely to Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding tool, with Q1 revenue and usage growing 80-fold on an annualised basis. Q2 revenue is expected to reach around $11bn, more than doubling quarter on quarter, and reports suggest an adjusted quarterly operating profit of more than $550m is within reach.

The Association of Investment Companies notes that Baillie Gifford’s three trusts holding Anthropic (Scottish Mortgage, Schiehallion and US Growth) have more than doubled their internal valuation of the position. The NAV uplift brought Scottish Mortgage’s net asset value to 1,316.12p per share.

Why Anthropic Rather Than OpenAI

The question Baillie Gifford faced was why to back Anthropic rather than OpenAI. The answer appears rooted in market positioning. Anthropic has concentrated on enterprise customers, where contracts are stickier and pricing power greater than in consumer AI. Its emphasis on safety and interpretability has made the Claude model suite more acceptable to regulated industries: financial services, life sciences, legal. Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, and Baillie Gifford appears to have concluded that the spinout has built a differentiated cost structure, training frontier models at roughly half the cost of rivals.

The comparison with OpenAI is instructive on valuation. OpenAI closed a record $122bn funding round in late March, reaching a $852bn valuation. Anthropic’s Series H has now pushed past that, making it technically the most highly valued private AI company. Whether the premium is justified depends on whether the enterprise focus translates into durable margin. The operating profit signals are early but point in the right direction.

On the IPO timeline, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 1 June 2026, preserving the option to list after SEC review. The Scottish Mortgage Anthropic holding currently represents approximately 2.6% of the portfolio.

SpaceX Concentration Remains the Defining Risk

Anthropic’s rise does not alter the most pressing structural question facing SMT shareholders: SpaceX. Scottish Mortgage’s own pre-IPO briefing note puts SpaceX at approximately 25% of the portfolio (the original trust disclosure cited over 20%; the company’s official note is the more precise figure). The holding is worth just under £3bn. Scottish Mortgage carries SpaceX at a $1.25tn internal valuation, while SpaceX itself has reportedly sought a $1.75tn price in its IPO process, a gap the trust has publicly defended.

The trust cannot reduce its SpaceX position until August, which means short-term NAV volatility is largely outside management’s control. A significant downward rerating of SpaceX ahead of or at IPO would be the clearest near-term threat to SMT’s share price, regardless of how Anthropic performs.

Against that backdrop, the trust trades at a 10.4% discount to net asset value following a 6% pullback. For investors willing to accept the concentration, that discount provides some buffer on the private-market marks. The next test is SpaceX’s IPO pricing: the spread between Baillie Gifford’s $1.25tn mark and the market’s verdict will tell investors a great deal about how much of the current NAV is real.